The ULEZ effect

The majority of car buyers don’t buy new anyway. A car may last 15 years, of which it might be a one-owner car for the first four. You can buy a 2017 i3 like our old one for £15,000 and a Leaf for less, and there are quite a lot of both about. They may not yet be affordable for everybody, but a charging structure that encourages those that can to adopt one earlier can only help.

Constant but-but-butting won’t stop this. It is the only way, short of excluding vehicles altogether.

London has already answered this. In 2025, all Cleaner Vehicle discounts and exemptions end and the Congestion Charge becomes just that; everyone pays to drive. Expect something similar on other roads to take the place of Road Fuel Duty.

It can. But it applies to public chargers, not to home use. The government won’t — or shouldn’t — want to make a move that either detracts from its carbon-reduction plans or disproportionately affects the less affluent, and hence less likely to have a charger at home.

That would be my logic anyway. Might be too much to expect from Johnson’s rabble.

Reading this thread again it strikes me people in the UK are happy to:
1. Pay income tax to cover national services
2. Pay NI contributions for basic pension etc
3. Pay VAT on every purchase
4. Pay for access to cities

Anyone else seeing a pattern here ?

Probably easier to just give you an allocated government property and some pocket money.

I think that depends on how it is implemented.
Given the UK has ministers who don't understand how critical Dover is to exports I wouldn't be over confident they would implement a toll system that was fair for all.
There is already a tax on fuel that covers the more you travel the more you pay and is factored in to prices today, the government have already said charging away from your domestic site will cost more but that is not enough.
Pay per mile will make consumables in small quantities very expensive if the calculations are wrong forcing people towards population hubs. While that's good for Daily Mail reader's and their worshipped house prices it will make for miserable existence in overcrowded areas.

Interesting reasearch from the US a year or two back. They found a defined area of a city and gave a specific proportion of that population $500 a month in addition to their usual money. They expected the usual suspects to spend it on booze, drugs and women. In fact they did not (or the vast vast majority did not) and there was a measurable improvement in well being, quality of life and unemployment as people could afford to commute to work.

So Universal Income is coming and in some respects, probably not a bad thing.

Maybe, but there comes a point where ‘This is what we’ve always done’ has to give way to ‘This is what we need to do’. You could reasonably argue that we’re way past that point with polluting cars.